Using the paint brush tool is an important part of working with Photoshop. First of all, a variety of Photoshop tools are applied with brush strokes, and learning to manipulate your brushes will help you to manipulate these other tools. Secondly, learning how to manipulate your brushes will give you more power and flexibility when it comes to actual painting, or adding colour to your Photoshop images and creations.

 

 

The brush tool is grouped with the pencil tool in the Photoshop toolbox. When you select the paintbrush tool, you will see its configuration options appear in the options bar.

 

 

You will notice a black circle or dot labelled Brush towards the left of the option bar. Underneath this dot you will find a number expressing the width of the brush tip in Pixels. If you click the small down pointing arrow next to the dot, you will display a menu with some preset brushes and a couple of slider switches.

 

 

If you click on one of the curving black lines in the scrolling field underneath the slider switches you will select it as your brush. To the left of these curving brushstroke samples you will see a number indicating the brush width for the given item.

 

 

If you scroll through the list of preset brushes, you will see some amazing variety to choose from, including brushes that simulate grass, leaves, and other textures.

 

You can use the master diameter slider to adjust the width of your brush tip. You easily choose a preset brush type, and then make it larger or smaller with the width slider.

 

You can use the Hardness slider to control the edges of your brush stroke. If the hardness is set at 100%, your brushstrokes will be very sharp and crisp. If the hardness value is very low your brushstroke will be soft and diffused at the edges.

 

As an example take a look at the following Photoshop canvas.

 

 

You can clearly see that you have tremendous flexibility with your brush strokes through the hardness and diameter settings.

 

You can choose from a variety of blend options for your brush by displaying the mode drop list from the options bar.

 

 

The best way to learn how these blend options work is through experimentation with them. Open a blank canvas by choosing File->New from the menu bar, and try painting with the different blend modes.

 

This is a brush stroke with the blend mode set to Normal.

 

For a stroke that looks something like spray paint, set the mode to Dissolve.

 

 

The other modes will control how the colour of your stroke interacts with the colour and brightness of the underlying image that you are painting on (including your own brush strokes if you paint over them).

 

You can easily select the colour for your brush strokes by using the eyedropper tool to select from the colour palette or the swatches palette. By default, your brush will paint with the foreground colour.

 

If you want to paint a perfectly straight line with your brush, click on your image canvas at the start point of your stroke, and then Shift + click at point where you want your stroke to end. The stroke will be painted in a straight line from point to point.